Tweet of the Day

Centrists: US healthcare system is the best.

Me: Shooting victim needs fundraiser to pay medical bills

Centrists: Fundraisers are awesome! https://t.co/U51pgBXlGb

— Salam Morcos (@SalamMorcos) October 16, 2017

Yea, pretty much.

Dried Out School Marm Cancels Recess

By "School Marm", I mean Mitch McConnell, and by "recess", I mean that he is delaying the Senate recess in an attempt to pass some variant of TrumpCare.

I understand where he is coming from, Republican politicians are getting savaged at their public meetings by their constituents, and one of the things that goes on when the Congress is on recess is meetings with the public.

McConnell is clearly trying to minimize opportunities for members of his caucus to interact with the public before they vote on the bill, because being screamed at by the mother of a profoundly disabled child who would lose coverage tends to make politicians skittish.

If this weren't literally a matter of life and death, I would be amused at the Republican discomfort at their current situation.

The Republicans May Not Have toRepeal Obamacare

Obamacare is good only in comparison to the status quo.

The best part of it, of course, is Medicaid expansion, which is basically single payer.

One of the claims made by Republicans is that Obamacare has reduced the quality of healthcare.

This is not true.

Another claim is that it is in the process of collapsing under its own weight.

This is (IMNSHO) untrue as well, but it appears that the ACA is at risk of collapsing its own insubstantiality:

Karen Slessor’s health insurance is hanging by a thread.

Slessor, a Reinbeck widow who has diabetes and arthritis, is one of nearly 72,000 Iowans who are on the brink of losing coverage as Congress tries to overhaul the country’s health care system. The at-risk Iowans buy their own health insurance policies, usually because they don’t work for employers that offer coverage and they don’t qualify for government insurance programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare.

Iowa is the first state where consumers face the likelihood of losing all access to individual health insurance policies, but experts say other states could soon follow.

The two largest health insurers offering individual coverage in Iowa, Aetna and Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield, announced last month that they would stop selling such policies for next year because of heavy financial losses and uncertainty in the market. In most of the state, that left just one relatively small carrier, Medica. The situation became critical on Wednesday, when Medica leaders said they probably also will pull out of Iowa.

If you know your Streetcar, you know that Blanche DuBois depended on the, "Kindness of strangers," and Obamacare depends upon the, "Kindness of insurance companies."

Of course, insurance companies have no kindness, and this problem with a lack of providers is not limited to Iowa, Tennessee has s similar (though less dire) situation, and huge swaths of the country have only one provider on the exchanges, meaning that Obama's neoliberal^* vision for healthcare reform would have been in trouble if Hillary hadn't lost the election.

Barack Obama's merry band of free market mousketeers may have created a system that is fundamentally unsustainable.

^*At Naked Capitalism, in the aptly named post, "Neo-liberalism Expressed as Simple Rules," gives two basic rules:

1. Because markets.
2. Go die!

This is an Interesting Way to Deal with Anti-Vaxxers

Michigan, which is a hotbed of anti-vaxx sentiment has boosted vaccination rates through the simple expedient of making getting a waiver slightly less convenient:

No amount of objective discussion or scientific data may ever be enough to convince some people that vaccines are indeed safe and effective at wiping out a slew of hellish and deadly diseases. But what does seem to work at convincing people to vaccinate their children? Bureaucratic hassle.

By adding an extra, in-person step to the process of obtaining a vaccination waiver (which allowed a child to forego the necessary vaccinations), Michigan quickly and significantly boosted its vaccination rate, as Kaiser Health News reports.

In the 2013-2014 school year, the state had the fourth highest rate in the country of children entering kindergarten with a vaccine waiver. But just one year after the extended waiver application process went into effect in 2015, the number of waivers issued dropped by 35 percent statewide. Vaccination rates rose accordingly.

………

“The idea was to make the process more burdensome,” Michigan State University health policy specialist Mark Largent, who has written extensively about vaccines, told KHN. “Research has shown that if you make it more inconvenient to apply for a waiver, fewer people get them.”

………

State legislators added the inconvenience factor after outbreaks of whooping cough and measles hit Michigan children. At the time, parents who didn’t want to vaccinate their kids could easily apply for a waiver over the Internet, by mailing in a form, or even via phone call in some places. But in a quiet, unfussy ruling in December of 2014, the state’s Joint Committee on Administrative Rules changed the waiver application process to require that parents consult in person with a county health educator before a waiver would be granted. 

It used to be easy for politicians to pander to anti-vaxxers, but since outbreaks in California and other states, the general public has become aware that they are a menace, and politicians have been less accomodating.

This is a very good thing.

I Want What He Is Smoking

In a discussion of the Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare, Cornell Professor Robert Frank drops this incredibly panglossian turd:

If the repeal effort stalls, attention will shift to what comes next. In an earlier column, I suggested that Mr. Trump has the political leverage, which President Obama did not, to jettison the traditional Republican approach in favor of a form of the single-payer health care that most other countries use. According to Physicians for a National Health Program, an advocacy group, “Single-payer national health insurance, also known as ‘Medicare for all,’ is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health care financing, but the delivery of care remains largely in private hands.” Christopher Ruddy, a friend and adviser of the president, recently urged him to consider this option.

This is not going to happen.

I would like for this to happen, if just to see how both the Clinton and Obama wings of the Democratic party twist themselves into knots to oppose this, but it's NOT going to happen.

I know, yadda yadda yadda, Nixon going to China, but it ain't going to happen, particularly when he would have to get it through the Senate, where his own Vice President would oppose this as its presiding officer, and the filibuster still exists.

Na ga na happen.

Tweet of the Day

It's almost as if a shadowy cabal figured out how to get people to pay more to die faster. pic.twitter.com/9yvlvNZN0d

— Honest Hillary (@Honest_Hillary) February 8, 2017

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Yes. I know, it's an old tweet. I was cleaning up drafts, and felt the need to share this.

Oh, Snap!

The Congressional Budget Office (has scored Paul Ryan's Obamacare replacement bill, and says that it would strip health insurance from 24 million people.

Rather predictably, the Republicans completely lose their sh%$, and attack the CBO chief that they themselves appointed:

An hour after the Congressional Budget Office released its dire assessment of the GOP Obamacare plan, Donald Trump’s top health official went on the attack.

"We disagree strenuously with the report," Tom Price said. "The CBO report’s coverage numbers defy logic."

That initial Republican assault on Monday was the first of many that amounted to dismissing their own scorekeeper.

Left unmentioned by Price, Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary: When he was in Congress, he recommended the CBO’s current director, Keith Hall, for the job. Hall took the helm at the CBO in April 2015, chosen by Republican House and Senate leaders to provide advice to a GOP-controlled Congress.

Obamacare sucks, the Republican proposal sucks even more, and the pre-2009 state of affairs sucked even more.

This might explain why the ACA hasn't created a groundswell of political support for the Democrats, "We suck a little bit less," which these days seems to be the motto for the Dems, just does not motivate voters these days.

If RFK Were Alive, He'd Kick His Ass

Robert F. Kennedy, JR is in discussions with Donald Trump in an attempt to promote his anti-Vaxx agendaas chair of a "Vaccine Safety Committee":

Donald Trump reportedly has met with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and invited him to head up a planned “vaccine safety and scientific integrity commission” with an as-yet-unknown directive, although it looks like a shot across the bow of the nation's ship of public health. It also now looks unclear whether or not Trump and Kennedy are on the same page about the invitation itself.

The idea of Kennedy being a part of any federal initiative related to vaccines is appalling, given his record of ignoring scientific evidence that doesn’t fit in with his ill-advised, fantastical fear-mongering about them. Why Trump would choose a lawyer over, say, someone with expertise in vaccines, toxicology and epidemiology is unclear. Perhaps it was Kennedy's comparison of vaccines to "a holocaust" that drew Trump's attention. What is clear is that these two are leaping at the chance to leverage some brand synergy.

I’ve covered Kennedy’s problematic response (or nonresponse) to scientific evidence as it relates to vaccines before. I’ve also covered Trump’s equally problematic relationship with facts as they relate to vaccines and autism, and the ways in which people who cling to one conspiracy theory are so likely to glom onto others. Paranoia can be a hell of a drug, for sure, something that savvy showmen easily manipulate for attention.

But it should surprise no one that Trump and Kennedy found each other. They’re not just having a meeting of conspiracy-oriented minds over vaccine fear-mongering. Maybe paranoia or an attraction to conspiracy theories led them to their mutually shared beliefs. But they also share another feature that keeps them from admitting when they’re wrong, and that’s their commitment to their respective name brands.

Kennedy’s claims about vaccines are staggeringly, blatantly incorrect. He’s had that pointed out to him, repeatedly. It may be that optimistic people looked at his name and lineage and thought that he might be reasonable and objective in assessing these facts. They mistook this Kennedy, who refuses to acknowledge even the most direct evidence controverting his claims, for someone who would go where data led him. Their mistake.

I don't know if RFK would be more upset at his kid spewing flat-earth anti-vaxx bullsh%$, or his offer to work with Donald Trump, but I'm pretty sure that he would be peeling the bark off of his kid right now if he were still here.

This Might Explain Anti-Establishment Votes for an Inverted Traffic Cone

Maybe all those people who voted weren't just deplorable racists.

Perhaps their lives are getting measurably worse.

Something is fundamentally broken in our society, as indicated by the fact that U.S. life expectancy declined last year:

For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year — a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States.

Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death.

“I think we should be very concerned,” said Princeton economist Anne Case, who called for thorough research on the increase in deaths from heart disease, the No. 1 killer in the United States. “This is singular. This doesn’t happen.”

A year ago, research by Case and Angus Deaton, also an economist at Princeton, brought worldwide attention to the unexpected jump in mortality rates among white middle-aged Americans. That trend was blamed on what are sometimes called diseases of despair: overdoses, alcoholism and suicide. The new report raises the possibility that major illnesses may be eroding prospects for an even wider group of Americans.

………

The number of unintentional injuries — which include overdoses from drugs, alcohol and other chemicals, as well as motor vehicle crashes and other accidents — climbed to more than 146,000 in 2015 from slightly more than 136,000 in 2014. Public health authorities have been grappling with an epidemic of overdoses from prescription narcotics, heroin and fentanyl in recent years. Xu said overdose statistics were not yet ready to be released to the public.

I would note that at least one of those, "diseases of despair," overdoses is being driven by our regulators allowing Pharma to both misrepresent the benefits and risks of opioids and aggressively promote their dangerous products.

Monopoly rents, and the ability of the powerful to loot our society may be nearing the point where we experience something akin to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

I would also note that Obamacare doesn't seem to help, but that is not surprising: High deductible plans that are beloved of the experts, because it means that people have "skin in the game", have been shown not to produce the desired effect: Consumers shopping for cheaper healthcare.

Instead they lead to people avoiding early, and less expensive, medical interventions.

Well, This is a Hoot

It appears that in discussions with the Republican Party leadership, representatives of the healthcare and insurance industries said that they Obamacare repealed and replaced with Obamacare:

The nation’s health insurers, resigned to the idea that Republicans will repeal the Affordable Care Act, on Tuesday publicly outlined for the first time what the industry wants to stay in the state marketplaces, which have provided millions of Americans with insurance under the law.

The insurers, some which have already started leaving the marketplaces because they are losing money, say they need a clear commitment from the Trump administration and congressional leaders that the government will continue offsetting some costs for low-income people. They also want to keep in place rules that encourage young and healthy people to sign up, which the insurers say are crucial to a stable market for individual buyers.

………

On Tuesday, Marilyn Tavenner, the chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a leading industry trade group, warned that the state marketplaces were already on unstable financial footing. Failing to continue the funding aimed at low-income Americans, she said, would have far-reaching consequences because the business would become much tougher for insurers.

………

Hospital groups also held a news conference on Tuesday to warn of what they said would be the dire financial consequences of a repeal if the cuts to hospital funding that were part of the Affordable Care Act were not also restored.

………

Ms. Tavenner did not give many details about her group’s positions, but she said its top priority was to stop the immediate threat of eliminating the subsidies for plans sold to low-income people. House Republicans have already sued to block these payments, and the lawsuit is now delayed. If the new administration chose not to defend the lawsuit, the money would disappear, and insurers would probably rush to the exits because fewer potential customers would be available.

Another of the industry’s concerns is ensuring that enough young and healthy people sign up to stabilize the market. Republicans have discussed eliminating one of the law’s main tools, the so-called individual mandate, a tax levied on those who do not enroll.

In talking with Congress, Ms. Tavenner said, her members are emphasizing the need for some alternative, especially after criticism by insurers that the penalty is not large enough to persuade enough people to enroll. “There’s not one magic solution,” she said. She pointed to some of the provisions in Medicare that encourage people to sign up before they become sick. And she discussed some options to ease how insurers price their policies to be able to offer plans that are less expensive to younger people.

She also argued that the insurers had no desire to return to the time before the law was passed, when people with pre-existing conditions were routinely denied coverage in the individual market.

So basically, they want the subsidies, marketplaces, and mandates, but apart from that they are fine with whatever is done.

Of course, subsidies, marketplaces, and mandates are Obamacare:  The rest is commentary.<sup>*

*</sup>Yes, I am applying a quote from Rabbi Hillel.

Yes

Over at FT, Gillian Tett asks, "Did Obamacare help Trump?"

The answer, of course, is yes, and it did Even If It Improved Medical Outcomes for one very simple reason:

Or to put it another way, Obamacare is not just a tale about healthcare and costs; it is also a story of people who feel trapped in a capricious system that they don’t understand, much less control. Little wonder, then, that Trump’s message about empowerment and fixing Obamacare turned out to be so popular this year. Now let’s see if he can deliver.

(emphasis mine)

This is typical of incrementalist "squish" progressives.

They create a program with overweening bureaucracy with extensive means testing, and create a system that is opaque and abusive to to its recipients.

For them, it's a win-win:

• They think that they can sell this to conservatives, because they ensure that all recipients are "deserving". (Note: this never happens)
• They create jobs for the professional class that is the base of the Obama/Clinton wing of the party.
• They create opportunities for private gain, which is an independent good according to their neoliberal worldview, because it will create market driven innovations.

Of course, this makes any of their programs about as pleasant as a trip to the DMV, and convinces the general population that government screws up anything.

The Answer Should be, "No".

While I am not a big fan of Nancy Pelosi, she learned the lesson of the Social Security fight with George W. Bush in 2005, when her response was simply "no."

No counter proposals, no deals, just, "No".

It worked, and it did a lot of damage to the both Bush and the Republican Party.

Paul Ryan, the "zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin" is proposing to privatize Medicare.

Nancy Pelosi gets it, and once again, her strategy will be "No", no counter proposals, no deals, just, "No":

Democrats are wandering around in the wilderness once again, shut out of power in Washington after losing a close, hard-fought presidential battle. The last time this happened, after the 2004 elections, the newly reelected president, George W. Bush, over-read his mandate and launched an ill-fated effort to partially privatize Social Security, providing a rallying point for Democrats to begin turning things around.

In an interview with me, House Dem leader Nancy Pelosi argued that history might repeat itself, if House Speaker Paul Ryan — with Donald Trump’s blessing — makes good on his hints to press forward with his plans to privatize Medicare. Pelosi vowed that Democrats would remain united in the battle to stop Ryan’s plan, a goal she described as crucial to defeating it, just as unity enabled Dems to block Bush’s Social Security plan.

“At that time, we committed to each other that we would be unified and disciplined,” Pelosi said. “Bush had just been elected. He gave us an opportunity by saying he would partially privatize Social Security. Everybody stuck together. The opportunity that we have now is the equivalent of the opportunity we had in ’05.”

In that 2005 fight, Pelosi recalled, Democrats actively avoided developing an alternative plan to Bush’s. Instead, Democrats said their plan was to defend Social Security, a very popular government program. At the time, some Democratic strategists warned against uncompromising opposition. But the gamble paid off. Observers noted that Bush’s plan sank in popularity as Dems remained unified behind a refusal to budge in defense of Social Security, a move that was widely credited with helping to put Dems on track to winning back Congress in the 2006 elections.

Now is not the time to listen to the the professional political consulting class of the Democratic Party, who will advise a counter-offer, and compromise, and bipartisanship.

Their advice is horrific policy, and even worse politics, and Pelosi is right to eschew the inevitable calls to capitulation.

These consultants are, with the possible exception of Dick Cheney, the most excessively overemployed people on the eastern seaboard, and they should be fired ……… Out of a cannon ……… and into the sun.

The Upside of the Measles Outbreak in California

It appears that parents are now looking for pediatricians who refuse antivaxxers as patients, because they are affraid of their wee bairns picking up something in the waiting room from unvaccinated kids:

Pediatricians around the country, faced with persistent opposition to childhood vaccinations, are increasingly grappling with the difficult decision of whether to dismiss those families from their practices to protect their other patients.

Doctors say they are more willing to take this last-resort step because the anti-vaccine movement in recent years has contributed to a resurgence of preventable childhood diseases such as measles, mumps and whooping cough. Their practices also have been emboldened by families who say they will only choose physicians who require other families to vaccinate.

Here's hoping this this becomes far more wide spread.

The science is bad, and they are putting other people's lives at risk.

This May be My Best Writing of the Decade

A participant at the Stellar Parthenon BBS was commiserating about how he had to buy health insurance, and it was all expensive and crappy coverage.

He ruefully observed that  his cheapest option (he's a Jew) was to join "Medi-Share", an evangelical Christian health co-op, but that would require him to, "Declare a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ."

Somehow or other, my muse grabbed my hands, and this flowed from my fingers:

You know, back in the day, Jesus and I went drinking and engaged in pig contests.

The person who beds the ugliest babe wins.

He never lost, and once he came 1st, 2nd, AND 3rd.

Damn! That guy could work miracles with women.

And he could make a Tequila Sunrise like no one's business.

Eventually though, he flunked out of school.

Test problems, he got nailed on the boards.

I am so glad that (at least until January 21) I live in a nation where blasphemy is legal.

How Convenient

The exchanges opened up yesterday for next year's insurance.

In Minnesota, the voice lines were shut down by a massive influx robocalls:

The health insurance shopping season got off to a rough start Tuesday with technical difficulties at the MNsure website, complaints over long waits at the health exchange call center and a claim from DFL Gov. Mark Dayton that MNsure had been targeted by robocallers trying to tie up phone lines.

The troubles came on a day when MNsure hoped to dismiss any lingering doubts about an IT system that outraged many consumers during its balky launch in 2013.

With health insurance premiums jumping by more than 50 percent on average next year, MNsure is the only source in Minnesota for federal tax credits that could blunt the impact of rate spikes. State officials told shoppers to buy early, because caps on enrollment in most health plans mean that most insurance options could disappear altogether.

Many MNsure users successfully enrolled in coverage, but others complained of error messages, locked accounts and uncertainty about whether they’d successfully enrolled in a plan. By late morning, a key section of the MNsure website was down for about 30 minutes, along with portions of websites at nearly 70 other state agencies.

The MNsure call center opened at 8 a.m., and shoppers were complaining within a few hours about long wait times. DFL Gov. Mark Dayton told reporters that the state’s IT division found the waits were being ballooned by automated call systems.

“Somebody’s trying to jam the call center, and making robocalls to try to snafu the thing — which is deplorable,” Dayton said. “They’ve identified that culprit, and are acting … to exclude them from the system.”

The term for this is ratf%$#ing, a term originated often used by Nixon's dirty trick squad, of which Roger Stone, ratf%$#er for Trump, was a prominent member.

This is no innocent technical error.

Our Broken Pharmaceutical System

Insulin has been around for 95 years, but the price keeps increasing more than twice as fast as inflation:

At first, the researchers who discovered insulin agonized about whether to patent the drug at all. It was 1921, and the team of biochemists and physicians based in Toronto was troubled by the idea of profiting from a medicine that had such widespread human value, one that could transform diabetes from a death sentence into a manageable disease.

Ultimately, they decided to file for a patent — and promptly sold it to the University of Toronto for $3, or $1 for each person listed. It was the best way, they believed, to ensure that no company would have a monopoly and patients would have affordable access to a safe, effective drug.

“Above all, these were discoverers who were trying to do a great humanitarian thing,” said historian Michael Bliss, “and they hoped their discovery was a kind of gift to humanity.”

But the drug also has become a gift to the pharmaceutical industry. A version of insulin that carried a list price of $17 a vial in 1997 is priced at $138 today. Another that launched two decades ago with a sticker price of $21 a vial has been increased to $255.

The magic of the market is a myth when it comes to drugs.

We need to stop evergreening minor changes in drugs, and we need to adopt the price controls used by the national health systems of other industrialized nations.

This is insane.

End Stage Imperial Collapse

There has been a massive increase in organ donations in New England over the past few years.

Any guess as to why?

Wait for it ………

You got it: there has been a corresponding explosion in opioid related deaths which has resulted in young people being available for harvest:

This year, some hospitals in Massachusetts, like Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, have dramatically increased the number of organ transplants they perform. The sources of these lifesaving gifts are the victims of the opioid epidemic. Although the increase in available organs represents hope for some and brings a small degree of comfort to the families of those lost to deaths from drug abuse, the wait continues for many more on the transplant list as well as families of addicts seeking services.

………

The liver represents just part of the dramatic increase in New England organ donations since 2010, according to the New England Organ Bank, the organization responsible for gathering the organs in the six New England states. The expansion is due to the growing number of organ donors who fell victims to the growing epidemic of opioid abuse. Since the beginning of the year, more than one in four organ transplants in the New England area originated from people suffering a drug overdose. Nationwide, organs from deceased drug users accounted for 12 percent of all donations this year. Traffic accidents used to be the fourth-largest source of organ donation, behind deaths from strokes, blunt injuries, and cardiovascular disease, but drug overdoses, now the fastest growing category of organ donor, eclipsed them in 2014.

Given that the increase in mortality and morbidity from these drugs seems directly tied to aggressive marketing and lobbying from the opiod lobby, this whole vicious cycle should have been shut down years ago, but no one has the guts to handle this.

What I Did at My Former Job

My contract just finished up at Noxilizer, so I can end my self-imposed embargo, and write about what I did there.

Noxilizer uses a proprietary (and patent protected) NO₂ based sterilization system.

NO₂ is a powerful oxidising agent, and it has some advantages over other sterilization technologies: It operates at room temperature, and it leaves no residue.

A company called Eniware partnered with Noxilizer to create a sterilization unit that can operate in undeveloped ares.

It runs on batteries and used a gas generator (Copper and Nitric Acid), and after 8 hours the instruments in the chamber are sterilized

Below is a video of Eniware's founder extolling the virtues:

Seriously? There is an Opioid Lobby?

Seriously. Pharma has lobbyists whose job is to make sure that over-prescription and addiction continue.

Ka-Ching!

The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity teamed up to investigate the influence of pharmaceutical companies on state and federal policies regarding opioids, the powerful painkillers that have claimed the lives of 165,000 people in the U.S. since 2000.

The news agencies tracked proposed laws on the subject and analyzed data on how the companies and their allies deployed lobbyists and contributed to political campaigns.

$880 million in lobbying, over a thousand lobbyists, AstroTurf groups, the whole megilla.

Not enough bullets.

Sugar is Evil

I am not referring to Glucose, or Fructose, or Sucrose, but rather the recent revelation that the sugar industry bribed scientists so that they would minimize the impact on heart health:

Back in the 1960s, a sugar industry executive wrote fat checks to a group of Harvard researchers so that they’d downplay the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

One of those Harvard researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he set the stage for the federal government’s current dietary guidelines. All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets and shift the blame solely to fats—for nearly five decades. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic.

The bitter revelations come from archived documents from the Sugar Research Foundation (now the Sugar Association), dug up by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. Their dive into the old, sour affair highlights both the perils of trusting industry-sponsored research to inform policy and the importance of requiring scientists to disclose conflicts of interest—something that didn’t become the norm until years later. Perhaps most strikingly, it spotlights the concerning power of the sugar industry.

“These findings, our analysis, and current Sugar Association criticisms of evidence linking sucrose to cardiovascular disease suggest the industry may have a long history of influencing federal policy,” the authors concluded.

………

After the review, the sugar industry continued to fund research into heart disease and other health issues. By the 1980s, few scientists focused on the role of sugar in heart disease. The 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans emphasized curbing fats and dietary cholesterol to prevent heart disease.

Today, Nestle points out, “the balance has shifted to less concern about fat and much greater concern about sugars.” But, the story should act as a cautionary tale of the potential harms from industry-sponsored studies.

"Potential harms" from "Industry sponsored studies"?

Real harm, time, and time, and time, and time, and time again.

This crap is inherently corrupting, and any researcher that takes industry money should be debarred from federal funding.

Any researcher that takes industry money and does not explicitly and clearly reveal this should be debarred from federal funding for life.